The latest news about how Microsoft is going to cater to Linux developers is big news. There is a lot of the computer world hidden in that idea. Peter Bright describes Why Microsoft needed to make Windows run Linux software “And how it could leapfrog Apple as the dev platform of choice.” Microsoft has always been after schools for its platform with the idea that familiarity by students would lead to future development for its platforms. Times have changed and it has been losing ground so now it is time to reset.
Microsoft is positioning WSL strictly as a tool for developers, with a particular view to supporting Web developers and the open source software stacks that they depend on. Many developers are very familiar with the bash shell, with building software using make and gcc, and editing text in vi or emacs. WSL will give these developers versions of these tools that are equal in just about every regard to the ones you get on Linux, because they’ll be the ones you get on Linux running unmodified on Windows.
With that developer focus, Microsoft isn’t supporting WSL as a deployment platform. It might be possible to run, for example, the Apache Web server under WSL, and it might even be useful to do so for development, but the intent is not that applications would ever be run in production with this configuration.
…
it’s unlikely that the company would make such a move just to provide a few creature comforts to developers. The need goes deeper than that.Wind the clock back 15 years and Windows was the only serious platform for software developers. Linux was already an important consideration for servers, but on the desktop was even less of a concern than it is today, reserved only for the most hardcore fans. OS X was in its infancy, and only ran on weird, expensive, underpowered PowerPC hardware. This made Windows the development platform of choice by default. There simply wasn’t any good alternative.
…
But things don’t work that way any more.
…
Windows certainly hasn’t disappeared completely from view, but it’s no longer the essential, must-have platform that it once was. Why not? Because those two non-contenders in 2000 are more or less viable today. Linux for various reasons still may not be the most comfortable desktop platform (especially for anyone wanting to use it on a brand-new laptop), but it’s much more livable than it used to be. And OS X, thanks to a combination of the switch to x86 and Apple’s fine hardware design, has become an appealing option for a great many developers.
Running Android on Windows is a part of this as well. That is not only an incentive to support a Linux API but it also an entire ecosystem including developers, retailers, and users. You can see the influence of this in Windows 10 with its app store and other user experience changes from earlier versions of Windows. This latest effort is trying to keep up on the development side. The market is speaking. The behemoths are listening. This should be better for all of us.